Chương 26: Book 2 Chapter 7: Paper Leads

Jim took a large gulp from the wine bottle in his hand before passing it back to Lebowski who was sitting next to him leaning against the wall of his dormitory room.

"Thanks for bringing the wine," he told the boy with a sigh.

"No problem," the fat boy replied, looking at the window of the room, from which there was nothing to see due to the clouds having come out today.

"Why'd you call me today and not anytime during the last two months?"

"I needed to ask you a question," Jim muttered.

"And get drunk," he added.

"What's the question?" Jim hesitated for a few moments, then remembered he could technically blast out his throat any second if the conversation got too awkward.

"This is all hypothetical, but it's been bothering me a lot." Lebowski said nothing for a while, before finally answering.

"What's a hypothetical?"

"..."

"..."

"..."

"I'm just fucking with you," the boy said with a chuckle, scratched his scalp, before taking a gulp from the wine bottle.

"I knew that!" Jim exclaimed, starting to slur. He hadn't drank in a while, his resistance was disappearing. He sighed.

"Hypothetically, if you were stuck in a time loop in which you restart the semester every time you die, which is designed to end under the condition of resolving the calamity issue, but you didn't know how many attempts you had left, what would you do?" Jim asked. Lebowski crossed his eyes.

"Well. What's the consequence of failing to resolve the calamity while just living out your life, do you also get sent back even if you don't die at some point?" Jim suddenly paused, furrowed his brows. He hadn't survived that long yet…

"No clue."

"Then I'd check that first. If failing doesn't reset it and dying sends you back, then… Didn't you just get a second chance," Lebowski said clearly, as always cutting to the absolute core of the issue with an amazing display of drunk critical thinking.

"You're right," Jim said. Time loop and visions, it was the same shit. He just had to survive.

"But, well, wouldn't it be a bit hard to survive the calamity?"

"What do you mean?" Lebowski asked confusedly.

"Just go east and stay on the coast of Riche for a bit. If it manages to make it until there, then you wouldn't have been able to do anything anyway, no matter how much you tried." He furrowed his brows.

"Are you sure it's going to happen though? it's been… a very long time." Jim waved him off.

"I mean, it's all hypothetical of course." He frowned.

"Then, to help with survival from other dangers though, would it be better to go through the normal process of the academy to learn important skills, or should I try to accelerate learning by trading in a favour to gain a mentor?" Lebowski drank, shrugged, drank, drank.

"I guess I understand now why you felt the need to improve so much in the semester break and took those two classes. As for mentorship… I mean, what kind of favour can you even give if you're always returning to the start of the semester anyway?" Jim suddenly froze, a light of understanding alighting on his face. Exactly. What kind of favour could Quatzel even demand?

The lich lacked a way to enforce a favour he didn't remember and Jim would inevitably always end up back at the start of the second semester, even if he died of old age.

"You're a genius!" Jim explained excitedly. In regards to mentorship, obviously it was faster to get personal tutoring when one considered that the usual classroom setting always dragged to favour the slowest of its participants, a fact that infuriated Jim to no end. The thing with mentorships was that mages generally demanded strict allegiances and pacts on not sharing the knowledge gained. However, if he simply travelled back in the end of his life, that knowledge could be gained without a permanent cost!

As for what Quatzel had said about not knowing how many attempts were left, if Jim simply lived his life as he otherwise would have and avoided death, dying of old age or by fighting off some dark evil far far in the future, then he would have lived the life he'd have lived anyway! A tap suddenly resounded through the room, like a stone on glass.

"Yhanks," Lebowski slurred.

"By the way, there is a pigeon on uour windowsill, it's stariing riight at you," he added, almost incomprehensibly. Jim quickly turned his head to see a grey pigeon sitting at his window looking at him with yellow beady eyes. It struck out and clacked its beak on the glass again.

"I've never seen that pigeon in my life, hypothetically" he reassured Lebowski, but the other boy was already asleep, surrounded by five wine bottles and snoring softly from where he was leaning against Jim's wall. Jim stood up, dusted himself off, stood there for a good minute or two. The time loop. When you really thought about it, it had nothing to do with the calamity as long as it didn't reset him whenever he failed to prevent it.

It was simply a second chance button for him when he inevitably died of old age surrounded by all the money he'd accrued by that age. Maybe a kid or two, just to continue the family line. As for magic? Well, it had become rather obvious that he needed to advance his skills to survive until that hallowed time when he could pass away peacefully while laying on a luxurious satin bed-sheet and looking outside of a bright lit window at his large and golden-statue covered estate. Quetzal wanted freedom?

Who was Jim to deny the needy. If his so-called freedom inevitably turned to ash in his mouth, then so be it! Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. -/-"You interrupted me during a particularly fascinating conversation with a dear intellectual acquaintance of mine," Jim told Harry when he met the detective in the same alley as last time. At least the man had used the means Jim had so graciously loaned to him to stop looking like a homeless vagrant.

He even smelled somewhat acceptable now, a big step up! The tall, now fully bearded man gave Jim a disbelieving look.

"You mean the fat drunk kid on your floor jerking one out in his sleep?" he asked, causing Jim to freeze.

"He's what!" Jim shouted, turning around to storm off, only being stopped by two strong hands on his shoulders.

"Look, I don't care about your choice of dear intellectual acquaintances or whatever, we have shit to do!" Jim stopped and turned to the man, narrowing his eyes.

"Dangerous shit?" he asked suspiciously. Harry shook his head.

"The tunnels have been abandoned and Alice is nowhere to be found," Harry said darkly.

"Trust me, I've looked."

"Then what did you find?" Jim asked curiously, just about ready to scream for help and run in the other direction.

"I've gotten some information recently, the most safe investigative task that exists, but which still requires someone who's literate and who knows a few things about this mess to sort through. Need someone to help me, it's a lot, and I'm just too dumb and uneducated to do it alone," Harry said in a voice that appeared fakely sweet. Jim paused, furrowed his brows.

"You are very uneducated," he eventually said.

"And I am very smart. And literate." Jim thought he heard the man mutter something having gone to the same academy as him, however, the man simply exclaimed.

"Exactly! It's a perfect match!" with a false cheer. -/-"What is this?" Jim asked, aghast, as he stared at the gargantuan pile of documents on the detective's creaky hotel desk. There had to be hundreds, no, thousands of pages!

"Leads, or rather, something that could be leads," Harry explained as he dragged a second chair from the corner of the small room and sat down. A skeletal pigeon suddenly emerged from the middle of the stacks, squawked, and ran off to sit in the corner. Jim shuddered, being reminded of the lich who'd likely demand an answer to his proposition soon.

"That's paperwork, not leads," the boy pointed out.

"When you don't have any further clues, you go back to the basics," is what Harry had to reply to that.

"That's what we did at the- well, it doesn't matter."

"Rental agreement?" Jim asked as he picked up the top most document, quickly flipping through the three pages it was composed of.

"This is the rental agreement for the mansion to which the escape tunnel beneath the church led to, had some issues stealing it out of the notary's office, but I managed," Harry explained as he picked up another document.

"I put it on top as an example. Check the agreement duration." Jim quickly found the relevant section.

"This thing runs out in three months, but that's..."

"That's when you saw the calamity coming, in your hypothetical vision," Harry said with a nod, idly reading through the paper in his hand.

"People are funny like that, even if they know that a situation in which all rental agreements become void and don't matter anymore, they still reveal some of their intentions that you otherwise wouldn't have guessed at. Their thinking was likely simple. Or rather, their lack of thinking was simple.

The agreement has no meaning on its own, but considering their goal, even without your visions, it can be assumed, if corroborated with other evidence, that their plans come to fruition sometime at the end of the rental agreement." Jim idly nodded and picked up the next document. He furrowed his brows with some alarm.

"Bank statements?" he muttered before sighing as he saw the stamp in the bottom. The bank of Mitelos. Expected that they would have such a failed operational security that even Harry could get access to their private information.

"One thing often leads to another," Harry continued.

"And a rental agreement often at least mentions the name of the lessee's bank, if not even their contract number. One thing leads to another, always, if it doesn't you're not looking close enough."

"It's a very mundane means of investigation," Jim commented as he started skimming the contents. Withdrawal amounts, withdrawal locations, inbound cash, inbound locations.

"People put a lot of effort into hiding from divination. They seldom put the same amount of effort when hiding from an accountant. What I need your help with is going through these documents and finding some threads we can pursue further. As you can see, it's a lot of paper," Harry explained, having already flipped through several other documents while they'd been speaking. Jim looked at the intimidating pile, before sighing, tilting his head and asking one final time.

"You really think there's a point?"

"Yes."

"Alright, let's get started," Jim muttered. Professor Quatzel had said that one of the advantages of a time looper was the information they could gather in every attempt. Well, this, if anything, was one way of getting that information. -/- Hours had passed since Harry and Jim had started on the large pile and they'd made significant progress since, knocking off at least a fourth of the documents. Now they were taking a break to consolidate their findings.

"There's a common theme in the bank statements," Jim explained briefly.

"The money was being paid into the accounts regularly at the bank's branch in Doun, while being withdrawn here in Sredina."

"Anything else?" Jim shook his head.

"Alright, so the money is coming from Doun, which is the most western city in Mitelos. It's the place where all the mining is planned and ordered. Sredina serves as the place where the money is spent, which makes sense since they wanted to open a gate here, not Doun," Harry said with a nod.

"I'm surprised criminals use banks," Jim commented with a frown.

"Most people use a bank," Harry replied briefly.

"Anyway, criminal groups all need income streams too, after all, they have costs, and they can't simply meet all their material needs through crime. That would tip off the gendarmerie too fast. That means that the cultists, by logic, also must have income streams. As for where these income streams are, we can tell that they are in Doun, or the related area, since nobody would move money to another province physically to deposit it if they are already using a bank.

We can also tell that not all of the cultists have been apprehended, because there were a few payments still made after the capture here in Sredina, before the connection went cold and most of the money was withdrawn. Likely they assumed the connection was burnt and started anew."

"Mitelosians," Jim growled with narrowed eyes.

"They're siding with the calamity now? And here I thought they couldn't sink any lower…" Harry threw him an annoyed look.

"Most of the cultists taken in by the headmaster were from Riche, actually."

"Ah, ok," Jim said quickly, before waving his hand in the general go-on gesture. Harry frowned.

"Anyway, if money was deposited in Doun, that means that a bank clerk there likely saw a person depositing the money and from there is where we could technically find the cultists operating in Mitelos."

"Please don't tell me you want to go to Mitelos," Jim said with a scowl. Harry smirked.

"We don't need to. Another thing that people like doing is sticking to one notary when they find one they like. Turns out there's another rental property right here in Sredina that we should look at first. A warehouse." He pulled out a specific document from his finished pile and showed Jim the address. Jim nodded, quickly memorising the street just in case.

"When will you be going?" he asked.

"My pigeons are already there, no movement now, but it's late at night. I'll join them in the early morning. A few hours before sunrise is the best time for an ambush." Harry replied.

"Good luck with that," Jim muttered.

"Thanks for your help, kiddo," Harry suddenly said and clapped a hand on Jim's shoulder.

"You were useful."

"Someone with a brain had to be present," Jim said decisively with a nod, before looking away and blushing.

"Anyway, I'll be going then."

"Want me to escort you?" Harry asked. Jim shook his head, before pausing.

"No, but, well, I do have a question. Hypothetically, of course." Harry rolled his eyes.

"Hit me," he said.

"If you got offered personal tutoring from professor Quatzel in return for basically nothing… Is it worth it?" Jim asked. Harry blinked in surprise and froze mid-hair-scratch.

"You mean the lich?" he asked. Jim nodded.

"If there really aren't any conditions, you'd be an idiot not to," the detective said.

"He's the strongest mage in the country, by far. But do be careful, the most expensive deals are often those with an undefined price."

"Alright, I'll think on that," Jim muttered quietly before finally leaving the room and making his way back to the dorms, head full of thoughts, and thinking, and ideas. He needed to answer Quatzel's proposition soon, and so far, all the signs were pointing towards a…